Garden Bears' World - Flowers in January

 Hello everyone, and welcome to another Garden Bears' World post from me, Endon Bear.

Before all the snow melted last week, I decided to see which flowers were out in the garden.  One of my favourites is the Christmas Box, Sarcococca humilis, which is a neat, small, evergreen shrub with very glossy leaves and tiny white flowers with a lovely vanilla scent.  Polar has planted several of them near the back door so we can enjoy the fragrance.

From the Sarcococca, I could see a bright splash of yellow near the birdbath, so I set off down the path for a closer look.  It was the Witch Hazel, Hamamelis x Intermedia which shows up very nicely because Polar planted it in front of the dark green leaves of the Rhododendron and Mahonia (which still has a few yellow flowers of its own).

The flowers are like little fireworks!

There are snowdrops coming up all over the garden.  Since these pictures were taken, some of them have started flowering properly.  There are two types, one taller than the other, all of them propagated from two little clumps found at the very bottom of the garden when Polar and Grizzly first moved in.

I found a very pretty double pink hellebore in the flowerbed near the bird table and a white cyclamen in the little border under the espaliered pear tree.

Out in the front garden, there are a few more snowdrops and some smaller hellebore plants, but the bed nearest the window is quite dull, even when the snow has cleared.

Polar and I ordered some shade-tolerant winter plants for this bed and, soon afterwards, a very big box arrived with all the plants' containers securely stuck to the bottom!  

 I helped Polar get to them by nibbling holes in the cardboard so we could tear off the top part of the box.

Inside were some ferns, two different Bergenias (Elephants-ears) and a Skimmia.  Polar said we shouldn't plant them while it was so cold because, although they are very hardy plants, they might have been growing in a warm greenhouse or polytunnel, so need time to get used to cooler conditions.  She also explained that plants need to drink plenty when they move to a new home and are settling their roots in, and they can't do that if the water in the soil is frozen.

So we took them down to our cool greenhouse.  While Polar finished unpacking them, I checked on my sweet pea plants and was pleased to see they looked very healthy.

And here are the unpacked plants for our winter garden by the front window.  Polar says we can transplant some Christmas Box plants into that bed too, and some more snowdrops as they always need splitting and replanting after they have flowered.  

 She says it's too shady for the dogwood plants with colourful stems that I like, but that if we grew some somewhere else, we could always clip some stems off to push into the ground in our winter bed to add some extra colour, and no-one who didn't look very closely would be able to tell they weren't growing there!

I hope we'll be planting all our new plants soon, then I can tell you all about it in the next episode of Garden Bears' World!